The Undermain Icons series profiles Kentucky artists whose work has achieved national or international recognition — yet whose stories, creative processes, and connections to the Commonwealth remain largely untold. Each monthly installment is a work of literary journalism: a deeply reported, long-form feature built on studio visits, firsthand interviews, and original research that places the artist's work in historical, biographical, and cultural context. Made possible by a grant from the Kentucky Historical Society and Kentucky Arts Council, the series spans disciplines — visual art, music, literature, film, sculpture, photography — reflecting the breadth of Kentucky's creative contribution to American culture. 

August, 2026

Anthony Philip Heinrich: The Log Cabin Composer of Kentucky

By Ron Pen
Contributing Writer

The story of Anthony Philip Heinrich’s life is simply too bizarre to be anything but fiction. You just can’t make up a story like this. Celebrated contemporary author Erik Larson, who has penned a slew of nonfiction works that read like page-turner novels, would enjoy a field day with this subject.

The music that Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861) composed is far too extravagant, visionary, wildly Romantic, eccentric, and yet meticulously crafted to be tethered to his time and place. His personality and ambition carried him across continents, through multiple careers, from riches to abject poverty, from monumental successes in the most prominent cities in Europe and America to residence in a humble log cabin in the western frontier of Kentucky. He created a vast collection of original compositions — songs, orchestral fantasias and chamber works with evocative titles, such as The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature, The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or the Condor of the Andes and the Eagle of the Cordilleras, The Treaty of William Penn with the Indians, and A Sylvan Scene of Kentucky or The Barbecue Divertimento. 

The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christopher Keene performing the Heinrich composition Ornithological Combat of Kings.

The Heinrich legacy includes service as the chairman of the committee that created the New York Philharmonic in 1842, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. He was known as “the log cabin composer of Kentucky” and later in life he was bestowed with the sobriquet “the Beethoven of America.” Heinrich is our nation’s most prominent early composer of “classical music,” and his career really unfolded in our city of Lexington that was becoming the “Athens of the West.”

Athens of the West

Here we are, celebrating 250 years of history since the founding of the city at McConnell Springs. That history has been intertwined with the arts practically from the beginning, but certainly there was no chapter as remarkable as the musical activity occasioned by the arrival of Anthony Philip Heinrich in late October 1817, just 42 years after Lexington was settled. Heinrich’s Lexington was the largest town in Kentucky with 5,000 inhabitants, of whom over 1,500, or 30%, were enslaved. James Flint’s contemporary account in Letters from America 1818-1820 described it as “the capitol of fashion in Kentucky. There are here many genteel families, a few of which keep coaches. The town, on the whole, exhibits a well-dressed population. Its inhabitants are a cheerful, gay, and conversable people. Most of them are capable of conversation upon literary subjects.” 

Lexington was an agricultural center particularly focused on hemp and tobacco cultivation and had already become a center for thoroughbred horse breeding and racing. Around 1805, poet and travel writer Josiah Espy of Pennsylvania dubbed it the “Athens of the West” in a poem: 

But Lexington will ever be,
The Loveliest and the Best;
A Paradise thou’rt still to me,       
Sweet Athens of the West.

He described it in glowing terms in his Memorandums of a Tour made by Josiah Espy in the States of Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana Territory in 1805:

“Lexington is the largest and most wealthy town in Kentucky, or indeed west of the Allegheny Mountains; the main street of Lexington has all the appearance of Market Street in Philadelphia on a busy day … I would suppose it contains about five hundred dwelling houses, many of them elegant and three stories high. About thirty brick buildings were then raising, and I have little doubt but that in a few years it will rival, not only in wealth, but in population, the most populous inland town of the United States … The country around Lexington for many miles in every direction, is equal in beauty and fertility to anything the imagination can paint and is already in a high state of cultivation.”

The main street was a mile and a quarter long and 80 feet wide with 12-foot sidewalks. It was a progressive city with businesses owned by women as well as free African Americans, a cosmopolitan city with strengths in business, education, religion, science, medicine, society and culture, a lovely city with “an architectural elegance of its buildings not surpassed by eastern cities” according to a contemporary newspaper description. 

Celebrated architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who supervised the construction of the Washington, D.C., Capitol, had plans for eight projects in Lexington, including the First Presbyterian Church, the Pope Villa, and Henry Clay’s Ashland Estate. The city also possessed a culture that complemented the bricks and mortar. The Marquis de Lafayette, upon visiting, said of Lexington that “the establishments for public instruction rival the most celebrated colleges and universities in the principal towns in Europe.” (Quoted in James Klotter and Daniel Rowland (eds.) Bluegrass Renaissance. Lexington, Kentucky 2012) Transylvania College, founded in 1780, was envisaged as “Oxford in the wilderness,” so it was not as surprising as it might seem that Heinrich departed from the great cities of Europe and walked and boated 700 miles from Philadelphia to Limestone (now Maysville) to settle in Lexington. 

Heinrich Bio in Brief

Heinrich was born in Schönbüchelm, Bohemia (now Krásný Buk, Czech Republic), on March 11, 1781. He was adopted by his uncle, who owned manufacturing plants, warehouses, banks, and a variety of mercantile businesses. Young Heinrich traveled widely, expanding the family fortunes, and even crossed the ocean to “take a peep” at America, as he phrased it. He was fluent in seven languages, was an accomplished violinist and pianist, and was always accompanied by the cherished Cremona violin he’d purchased in Malta. 

Unfortunately, the Napoleonic Wars destroyed the European economy and devastated Heinrich’s personal finances. He and his wife left Bohemia and returned to America in 1814, oddly leaving their young daughter Antonia back in Europe. Shortly after they arrived in Boston, his wife died and Heinrich was left alone, adrift, and penniless, so he traveled to Philadelphia where he made his living as a musician for the first time. He then walked 300 miles to Pittsburgh, where he was invited to serve as orchestra director at a theater, but by the time he arrived, the theater had closed. Just as well — a contemporary account described it as soot-stained by the coal smoke fog. “Such a theatre! It was the poorest apology for one I had ever seen.” (Noah Miller Ludlow in Dramatic Life As I Found It, St. Louis, G.I. Jones & Co. 1880)

Heinrich subsequently traveled 10 days down the 400 miles of the Ohio River on a flatboat and arrived at Limestone, now the city of Maysville. From there he walked 60 miles to Lexington, passing the community of Washington, past the terrestrial paradise of Mayslick to the rougher, stonier, less cultivated, less inhabited area of Blue Licks, where, in 1782 a group of Americans from Bryan Station, including Daniel Boone, was defeated by a force of British and Indians, with 60 of 176 Americans killed. 

Heinrich continued walking, sleeping out in the open air, past Millersburg, a small town with a bank, several large grist mills, and Kentucky Wesleyan University, founded in 1817. Eight miles later, he arrived in the bustling town of Paris, then began the last leg of the journey along 20-odd miles through the lovely heart of the Bluegrass region. He probably arrived in the city by late October or early November, and just a few days later our historic musical event at Postlethwait Tavern transpired. [Biographical information is largely adapted from William Treat Upton. Anthony Philip Heinrich: A Nineteenth-Century Composer in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. For a timeline of Heinrich and historical context see  http://anthony-philip-heinrich.com/en/about-composer/]

No known renderings of the original Postlethwait Tavern exist, but the O’Neal/Graves Tavern, built by Thomas Sims Graves in 1834 (located at 5023 Old Versailles Road in Lexington) would have resembled the contemporary Postlethwait Tavern structure described as a “low rambling log house” located on the banks of Town Branch Creek. Several years later, Postlethwait built a stone addition containing 12 rooms.